Aren’t We All More Than Some Label?

They say she’s starting chemotherapy. She’s five. I have seen the hair fall out, little ones begging for life with their distraught mama’s on their arms at Children’s Hospital.

I have seen the dim in their eyes. The life sucked, pulled, and just drained and barely hanging on.

They need a voice. Advocates. People like my oldest daughter who support patients with finances and fundraising, buying sweatshirts with the “soldiers” name on it.

Yet, I wonder with all this action to label and claim, name, and declare feelings and diagnosis, patterns, rhythms, behaviors, and emotions….if somewhere along the way, we have missed the individual.

After all, a child is not “cancer”, “A.D.H.D.”, “Autism”, “Oppositional Defiant Disorder” or “abuse”. Your child, my child, all our children are more than the sum of what society labels them.

We may see “Down Syndrome”, but they are not “Down’s”, “Disabled”, “Malformed”, or “Hearing Impaired”…

They are laughing, giggling, souls from heaven, deposited on earth for the world’s growth, eduation, and benefit.

Eyes, a face, their stories unfold in a broader spectrums, often in uncertain ways…

Many colors and experiences paint a child’s life. Why do we just tack on a title and scoot them on their way? Aren’t kids more than some penned word in a file at some doctor’s office?

Yet, even we as parents, can miss the all-encompassing picture God is creating when He formed them in His hand, places them in a womb, breathed His very first breathe of life into each and every unique individual.

There was a mom I knew dozens of years ago. Her son had autism. She ignored the warning signs. He spiraled and declined and kept randomly cussing in me and my husband’s Sunday School class.

He behaved like his label, yes.

But later, I learned His family had been in shambles. The mom refused to change her son’s diet or take him to a retreat center her therapist recommended. She was smart, brilliant in facts and math, but simply ignored her son’s triggers, living reactionary…

He spiraled downward. She knew she was contributing. But her husband and her own marriage was failing, the dysfunction on all levels was at monumental proportions….

Still, she stood frozen, stagnant, feeling powerless, like there was nothing she could do about it. So she just blamed….

Blamed the label.

And is that what we do when we run out of our own resources; blame? When we feel we are powerless to a societal system, our own family’s dysfunction or another person’s situation influencing our family’s life?

Teacher’s blame parents? Parent’s blame systems? Political parties bate and divide? We attack race or differences? Isolate entire people groups because we have concluded all our mysery or dysfuntion is their problem…not ours?

And yet, who sees the child?

Who runs to their aid in a world of dysfunction? Who breaks the cycle of hate, puts a wrench in the things painstaking, breaking, and taring families apart?

Who will stop the break-up of hearts, address the mental health, the whole person, and provide resources to heal the very souls of these lost and unseen children?

I read a message about that five-year-old with cancer a few days ago. The class wants to make blankets, write letters, do all the things that are good and proper for anyone who is hurting…

Yet, I propose, so many are hurting…not just those with external, visible, and seen diagnosis…

Who is helping them?

So many people struggle, families barely holding on, individuals are riddled with emotional issues, trapped in internal pain nobody is noticing…

Yet, we judge those with unseen wounds? Hold them to a higher standard, then force them with our own unrealistic labels of “perfect”, judging or demanding preconceived expectations?

Is the child with visible, physical disablities actually more fortunate than the one with internal wounds, because the world can actually see their scars?

People scold or reprimand, demand a bar to be risen, little ones to live as if their situations, family’s, history, and health always has been perfect?

Why is that? Why can’t compassion flow with mercy, because we all have good, we all are striving, we all are broken, and we humbly know we all are thristy, searching for the same water, that never runs dry?

• He sits in an old age home. Nobody sees him. Outside he looks fine, but inward…He has Alzeimers. We ignore Him until the outside clashes with our idea of what an “old man” should talk and act like. We label him, and isolate him to his room, “Dementia”.
• She has been fiersely abused emotionally. She walks around, her hair in a bun, un-noticed, until she steps in the emergency room, black-eyes, broken bones, outward scars. Little did they know the internal manipulation was worse than any outward evidence. Yet, we discart her as, “Abuse victim”.

Why doesn’t anyone notice until it’s too late?

• He came from a hard family. Hid his hurts, lived with regrets, but nobody reached him. He appeared o.k. to most onlookers. But then, they see him one day on the streets. He begs, but by now they turn their heads away from him at the stop sign, as he carries his cardboard sign. We don’t want to see him. So, we turn our heads away and label him, “homeless”.

Why didn’t they help long ago? Where were their voices? Why does it take a “label” to get our attention? 

• A mom struggles with her children, until the doctor prescribed medicine, but then the whole family is in upheaval as a result of the side effects. The child is marked in their file, “diagnosis”.
• Marriages are often like plastic trophies, dangled, bragged about, announced on Facebook…until the divorce papers are signed. The deceit, the lies, the untalked about truth finally arises….Their label is now “divorce”. Where was their voice prior to this pain?

Oh how we need to see more than labels, the exterior, plastic masks we present for our own self-preservation.

I saw the fog this morning. It danced as birds glided through it, like a ballet at the paramount. All of nature, gliding, flowing, harmonizing together. A river flowing into a sancuary of healing…

Yet, we remove one piece and the whole ecosystem changes.

Could it be the same way with us? We take Jesus away from schools, discart the value of family, let go morals, and then hide behind phones, dispaying “perfect” images on Instagram…

All the while, our deep hurts, our whole person, our interior is either not seen, or is written off and defined by some label?

We are so much more, aren’t we? Each of us. Tightly woven into eachother’s lives like a storybook of cloth, written for the glory of the Higher One who made us.

We are not just labels. Our children, our families, our marriages are so much more.

Let’s look at our brothers and sisters with God’s eyes. Ask for His heart, long for His patience and kindness, compassion and mercy for one another.

The world has enough metal doors, plastic masks, man-made labels that silence us from confessing our weaknesses, admitting we are needy, fallable….

So, what if we all just lived vulnerable, real, honest, transparent….could we show the world that our children, our families, our inward person….

Is really what’s most valuable….

• A treasure that can’t be shrunk into one title
• A gift surpassing time and distance
• Something that existed because of Him, spanning into eternity

Friends, despite what society labels as, doctors or therapists, school teachers or psychologists compartmentalizes people as….

You, me….Each of us….Are far more than just….

Some label.

(Joining Char, Kelly, Mary & Ronja today)